trodden in the matting of the verandah showed where he had walked alone.
There is no eight-hour limit to an engineer's work, and the evening
meal with Hitchcock was eaten booted and spurred: over their cigars
they listened to the hum of the village as the gangs came up from the
river-bed and the lights began to twinkle.

"Peroo has gone up the spurs in your dinghy. He's taken a couple of
nephews with him, and he's lolling in the stern like a commodore," said
Hitchcock.

"That's all right. He's got something on his mind. You'd think that ten
years in the British India boats would have knocked most of his religion
out of him."

"So it has," said Hitchcock, chuckling. "I overheard him the other
day in the middle of a most atheistical talk with that fat old guru of
theirs. Peroo denied the efficacy of prayer; and wanted the guru to
go to sea and watch a gale out with him, and see if he could stop a
monsoon."

"All the same, if you carried off his guru he'd leave us like a shot. He
was yarning away to me about praying to the dome of St. Paul's when he
was in London."

"He told me that the first time he went into the engine-room of a
steamer, when he was a boy, he prayed to the low-pressure cylinder."

"Not half a bad thing to pray to, either. He's propitiating his own Gods
now, and he wants to know what Mother Gunga will think of a bridge
being run across her. Who's there?" A shadow darkened the doorway, and a